Africa's Imaginary Gay Crisis

Ebenezer Obadare writing in the New Humanist:

The situation in both Zimbabwe and Nigeria seems to validate the link between material privation and political suggestibility. Where people are poor and poorly educated (or not at all), they are more susceptible to political manipulation by demagogues who parrot easy explanations for complex and fundamentally rational economic problems. In most of Africa today, the insidious fiction that the “gay next door” bars the way to economic progress has been the cue for a massive pink-hunt.

As a social phenomenon, one with key transnational connections, Pentecostal Christianity in Africa has carried a moralist and doggedly anti-intellectual banner. On the one hand, Pentecostalism manifests as a moralising force that narrates Africa’s economic and political crises as an inevitable outcome of public immorality (and what can be more immoral than two men or two women going at it in their bedroom?), a situation, it would seem, that can only be rectified by a collective return to the straight and narrow. As an anti-intellectual force, Pentecostalism in Africa is profoundly ahistorical in that it eschews human, especially political, agency in favor of pseudo-spiritual “explanations”.